Raspberry Pi: a hardcore PC the size of a credit card

HOW does a slender piece of circuit board become a global phenomenon, selling more than 1 million units in its first year?

The Raspberry Pi may have been designed to teach kids to code, but the rest of the tech world has also gone wild for it, with its knock-down price - £32 for a miniature, bare-bones computer - low power consumption and its astonishing range of applications.

Despite its low cost, the Pi has everything a basic computer needs - processor, graphics and memory. And because it's also highly programmable, a huge online community has sprung up, customising their Pis and proudly documenting the results.

Enthusiasts have harnessed the Pi to power voice-activated robots (the RaPiRo), play musical instruments (the BeetBox), get sozzled with Pi-controlled beer brewing (BrewPi) and even control high-altitude balloons, beaming photos back from near-space (Pi in the Sky).

Of course it still is, essentially, a £32 credit-crunch PC and if you hook the Pi up to a keyboard and television you can just settle for surfing the web, playing games (there's enough horsepower to trump the PlayStation 2) and even watching films.

And that's exactly what I tried for my first Raspberry Pi project: creating a low-cost media centre via the Wi-Fi-connected Pi.

Unlike Sky TV, say, this credit card-sized board doesn't work straight out of the box. You'll need another computer to download the Pi's Linux operating system to an SD card, before loading that onto the Pi itself.

Thanks to the online tutorials, getting up and running takes little pre-knowledge - just time, patience and care: my first Raspberry Pi broke when the slot holding the memory card in place snapped, rendering it lifeless.

Two Pis and several days later, my media centre is up and running, and I'm watching catch-up television from the likes of the BBC's iPlayer add-on, and streaming films stored on my desktop computer's hard drive.

It's easy to use and brilliantly effective, though for just streaming online content it's not as cheap as Google's new £22 Chromecast TV dongle (though the Pi has access to far more content).

Flushed from the (eventual) success of my first project, I strip the Pi back down and prepare it for a proper programing session - exactly what the Pi was designed for. I start with the basics, wiring up a few LEDs to the Pi, and then start writing a program (grabbed from another online tutorial), to get them to switch on and off in a pattern: all easier said than done.

Wiring them up with each accompanying resistor is like threading spaghetti through a sieve, and several hours and 17 lines of code later, I'm still struggling, as only half of the LEDs I have are blinking. I give up on the idea - creating my own R2-D2 has never seemed so far off - and switch the Pi back to media-playing duties.

Which tells you something about the audience for the Pi: it's a great proposition for dedicated enthusiasts, and a tasty bit of kit for teaching kids to code. But the average user could be put off by the constant tinkering required to get the most out of it.

This hasn't, of course, held back the million or so enthusiasts out there, and if you're looking to see what a bit of perseverance, skill and 100 lines of code can achieve, look no further than the ingenious individuals on this page.